Toy launchers that discharge soft projectiles, such as toy foam darts or toy foam balls—commonly referred to as toy “guns” or “shooters”—are well known in the art. The toy projectiles are designed to safely impact upon a target without causing injury or damage.
Toy launchers may use one of various different mechanisms for launching the projectiles. One common mechanism for launching toy projectiles from a toy launcher involves the application of compressed air on the projectiles to launch them. The compressed air must be carefully controlled so as to only be in fluid contact with the projectile or projectiles that are intended to be launched at a particular time. Another known mechanism to launch toy projectiles is to feed the toy projectiles to contact one or more rotating flywheels and thereby propel the projectiles forward toward a target.
Prior art launchers use one of a variety of different types of magazines for toy darts. For example, one type of magazine has a clip or cartridge for feeding darts to a barrel of the launcher. Another type of magazine holds the darts and advances the darts to firing position with a biasing spring when released upon activation of a trigger.
As another example, a straight magazine may hold darts in one or more rows of dart holders, with a possible offset between the rows. A straight magazine may, for example, be input horizontally into a compatible toy launcher and passes sideways through the launcher as darts are launched. Such a magazine has been used with a compatible compressed air toy launcher, but is not ideal as a magazine that moves sideways requires a clearance on either side of the launcher and must be reinserted each time that it is reloaded.
Another known type of magazine is a circular drum-style magazine.
One such prior art launcher, for example, includes a drum that has a single ring of toy dart holders arrayed around the drum. This launcher launches the darts with motorized flywheels positioned in front of the drum and darts are pushed one at a time from the drum to the flywheels for launch. A shortcoming of this launcher is that the number of darts that can fit in a single ring on a drum is limited in practice by the size of the launcher.
A different prior art launcher includes a drum having two concentric rings of darts where the concentric rings are aligned with one another and the toy darts are launched sequentially first from one ring and, after all of the darts in one ring are launched, then the darts in the other ring are launched. This launcher requires a switch between launching from one ring to another after one ring is fully depleted of darts and is inefficient as it requires two rotations of the drum to launch all of the darts.
Another prior art toy launcher uses a drum that has two concentric rings of dart holders with an offset between the rings. However, because compressed air is used to launch the darts, the number of darts that can be loaded in a drum of a particular size is very limited so that the air does not impact upon more than one dart and undesirably launch multiple darts at the same time.
What is needed is an improved toy launcher and a drum to be used therewith that may hold a relatively large number of toy darts within a compact space, be efficient in limiting the number of rotations of the drum that are necessary to launch a specific number of darts, and allow the launching of the toy darts in quick succession, while at the same time maintaining a relatively modest form factor, which is useful to enable for children to be able to handle the toy launcher and is helpful for shipping and storage of the launcher. It is further desirable that such a toy launcher be manufactured without the use of compressed air, which, as noted above, would limit the number of darts that can be simultaneously stored in the drum, and which may increase the complexity of the toy launcher to ensure proper alignment of a nozzle and appropriate air pressures.